A nodal story

For the partial Pisces eclipse

Hey Substack, it's been a while. What you're about to see below is more or less two recent social media posts stitched together for a narrative, but I just wanted to let you know where I've been. To get to the short of it, I have been going through a mourning period and the loss of my mother after a short illness. In that period, in an eerie similarity to when my father passed, I have lost a few good friends as well. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is sound. I am living alone now and over the last few months I've realized I can't handle silence. I am one of maybe ten people that still pays for cable, so sometimes I leave the TV running for myself and my cats. I think it's helping us out because there's another human voice in the house. Laughter. Drama. What we used to call background noise.

I've also been dreaming about doors slamming shut, conversations, loud clanging and I wonder what it all means. You hear those noises in your sleep sometimes. It's not uncommon. After all, I do have 4 very noisy cats. It's usually the sound of them causing mischief. But in my head, in that realm of sleep, it's conversations bleeding over. It's a door slam. It's welcoming home someone I'll never see again or a gate closing between us.

It has been a whirlwind and incredibly painful few months. Within 5 years I have lost both of my beautiful, wonderful parents. Despite hanging in there I feel very much orphaned and abandoned. I feel so angry. I feel like a failure. I am navigating some big life stuff in my mid 30s and I'm not sure that I am really feeling my feelings sometimes. It feels like I am literally always cleaning now.

I think often about how this seems to be a remix of things I've been through before. Maybe it's a blessing to have lived through loss. For example, I'm not particularly intimidated by living alone because I've maintained my own home before. But never quite like this. Not really like this. Not these circumstances. I think my only comfort is I'll never be quite in this same place ever again. I can't be.

“I have spent a good chunk of my 20s, my 30s caretaking and caregiving and I think often about how I won't leave those roles. That role. It's for me. It is ultimately how I'm taking care of myself now. I am so sad and sorry and sometimes confused these days but I've been doing ok. I hope you are too. That's all I have to say for now.”

That final paragraph is the very end of my first Instagram post since I announced that I would be going radio silent for a bit to take care of my mother. I wrote that with more optimism than I have right now. I am dating a man that is about eleven years older than me. I hadn't really told him about my life circumstances because it felt a bit heavy to share that with a brand new person. We've known each other maybe five months now, have been consistently intimate, but it still wasn't quite time for that.

Frustrated with me, he reminds me that I haven't shared much at all. Recently, he asked me about my last three months. “Who died?” he asked.

“Do you really want that information? Are you sure…?”

“Yes!”

Intimacy is something else. In that same conversation I said I felt like I'm starting my life over, after this caretaking experience that has dominated most of my adult life. He inferred that must be why I'm drawn to community service and I said yes, I think so. That was just a week or so ago from now. And now…

Recently, I set up a way to schedule card reading appointments with me one on one as a permanent offering, and as a way to help myself out financially while going through my mom's transition. You can find that here on Calendly if you like. It's not something I expect to pay off any time soon. But I hope it's a decent seed for next year. This an example of something I would do for an astrological read. I learned this kind of draw with Marseilles some time ago -- you pull cards until you pull your first major arcana card to develop a full story.

The Fool is someone who just keeps going for better or worse. When he appears at the beginning of the major arcana journey, it seems like he's moving towards enlightenment. When he appears at the end, it quite literally looks like he's going off a cliff. Very often I think of the version of The Fool that seems to be heading off into madness.

Last night as I was leaving my boyfriend's house, he pointed out that my face looked strange. I said, well I'm trying not to be a dick to a friend that just dropped something heavy on me. Unfortunately, I may just have to be a dick or neutral if I can get there. It's actually just a bigger thing and not this specific thing, because it never is just one person. He said he was glad he doesn't have to deal with the social situations I have. For the first time in many years, I felt very embarrassed by that because he's right. I don't want to be in them either.

I did a perfunctory natal chart pull on this man that I like a lot. He does things I don't do and has a few things I don't have. Both of his nodes are reversed like mine, but his are in Virgo and Pisces specifically. When I see things like that, I wonder if I have encountered someone who is more prepared to meet the moment than I am. My own nodes are in Aquarius and Leo so I am definitely The Fool heading off a cliff in my life journey.

The Virgo/Pisces axis I'm learning is something else. It says go to the woods. It says the loud clanging will never stop. The current Aries/Libra story has predictably felt like a marriage, a tempestuous one maybe but a marriage all the same. It hasn't been easy. But there is something about a Pisces story that begins with Pisces that says we are going home for just a bit.

The metaphysical stuff doesn't sell so well. I know that. Everyone knows that. Let me share something else I know that you may or may not. There is a pile of cards behind the The Fool, a whole story: X of Cups, VII of Wands, reverse Page of Coins and King of Cups According to the cards behind him, The Fool keeps going for reasons both valiant and ridiculous. He's not nearly as embarrassed as I am, for example, because he's not self-conscious. That is the story of this eclipse season. It's genuinely time to ask if you feel stupid. Doesn't that sound strange? Are you simply following? What would happen if you stopped right now and marched back away from the cliff?

The lunar eclipse in Pisces is bringing lingering issues from watery depths. It's bringing renewed and broken faith. It's bringing annoyance. It's bringing everything you put off and then some. It's bringing belief and disbelief. There's a more critical presence with Neptune than you might expect. It's a great time to just not believe people. It's a great time to tell someone something because they can't hear you anyway.

I've been reading an interesting approach to grieving, the book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by the late Rabbi Alan Lew. I am not Jewish myself, but this was gifted to me by a couple of friends who invited me into a book discussion as a way to alleviate my own grieving. The first reading was wonderful, but by the time of the second discussing I backed off the cliff. My relationship with these friends unfortunately has been fraught with disbelief. Last night, I started re-reading Toni Morrison's Beloved. I may never pick Lew’s words up ever again. The other week I made macaroni and cheese for the first time for myself because I was always only making it for my mama and my dad. I may never make that for myself ever again. Yes, ever. The eclipse is happening in my 6th house and it makes me wonder if I've come as far as I can right now. Maybe all this organizing and activism stuff has been a distraction and I just need to go home for now. There are so many things I'll never touch again and many people I'll never see again and I'm always thinking about going home, and I'm always there again. Over and over and over…